A Daughter’s Search for a Father Wanted for Murder

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By Karen Valby

July 20, 2018

A DOUBLE LIFE By Flynn Berry 261 pp. Viking. $26.

Why must so many revenge fantasies fixate in such detail on the physical mutilation of women’s bodies? (As if the answer weren’t depressingly obvious.) Take Stieg Larsson’s best seller “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” which lingers unbearably, for pages and pages, over the description of Lisbeth’s rape. Why does the author feel the need to humiliate his heroine so completely? What a relief then for weary fans of the genre to discover Flynn Berry, who writes thrillingly about women raging against a world that protects cruel and careless men. She’s less preoccupied by scenes of abuse than the psychological toll of its threat. Her protagonists seethe over their knowledge of violence and are fueled by a howling grief for its victims.

Berry’s rich 2016 debut, “Under the Harrow,” about a woman hellbent on finding her sister’s murderer, won the Edgar Award for best first novel. Her latest, “A Double Life,” again takes us deep into an obsessed woman’s head. On the surface, Claire lives a tidy life in London. She’s a doctor, with friends to meet at the pub, and a dog to walk, and more than the average number of bolts on her apartment door. But Claire’s world is a construct. She was born under a different name, the daughter of a charismatic Eton-bred man of power who’s wanted for a decades-old murder.

Claire’s father, based on the real-life dastard Lord Lucan, loved her mother, until he grew tired of her. Before their divorce was final her dispensed-of mother stumbled half-dead into a bar, drenched in blood, and accused the future earl of trying to kill her with a steel pipe. The last time Claire ever saw her father was the weekend before the attack, when he’d given her the peppermint from his ice cream. “It’s difficult for me to think of that visit. Not because I could’ve stopped him, exactly. I was 8 years old. But the scene seems grotesque. The little girl, accepting a stick of red-and-white candy from him. It’s like he made me complicit.”

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She’s been on her father’s trail her whole adult life, anonymously skulking around the case studies and true-crime message boards and the high society borders of her father’s friends, who helped him escape while cruelly trashing her mother. But a constant anxiety courses alongside her searching. Is there a chance her dad is somehow innocent? And if not, was any of his love for her true?

Berry proved in “Under the Harrow” that her prose can be as blistering as it is lush. Here, too, the writing is rich and moody, without any unnecessary fuss. Every scene between Claire and her younger brother, quaking under a noose of Tramadol addiction, is breathtaking. “Robbie looks like our father. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why he mistreats himself. It’s the only act of revenge he can take.” I would read Berry’s view of sibling relationships in any genre.

But there’s the occasional sound of gears grinding in Berry’s sophomore effort. Claire secures an unlikely accomplice too easily. She finds the final hasty pieces to her great life’s puzzle in one stolen browser history. And Berry’s decision to shift perspectives throughout the first two-thirds of the book, from Claire’s slightly unhinged present-day head to a third-person recounting of the past, messes with her momentum.

But you do so want Claire to get her man, and the ending is as shocking as it is satisfying. As desperate and consumed as our messy heroine may get in the process, Berry always lets her hold onto her humanity.

Karen Valby is the author of “Welcome to Utopia: Notes From a Small Town.”